Remove your kids from state exams at your own peril - the privately educated will be the ones who benefit

By the time they make it to the Oxbridge entrance exam against Tarquin from Eton, your children won’t stand a chance

Children out on strike over too many exams in England (PA)

Tests: our lives are filled with them. From the age of seven onwards, we are subjected to examination upon examination for core English, maths and science skills, to ascertain how we’re developing as a product of the education system and to monitor our downfalls, in an attempt to improve on them. Tests can be challenging for children, but they are useful for monitoring where a child is up to in terms of their academic growth – and where a country is in terms of doing justice to those children.

The parents who have removed their children from school this week should not be concentrating on the ‘test culture’ of schools in this country – that isn’t the problem. Tests have a useful place in education. Instead, they should be complaining about the stagnant, mind-numbingly mundane nature of the curriculum.

It would be foolish to deny that exams are integral to our education system. Following primary school, children are examined in schools between the ages of 11 and 13 years, and then by external examiners through SATS, GCSES and A Levels between the ages of 14 and 18. And then, just when you thought it was all over, you have that entrance exam for a university course, followed by three years of back-to-back exams every January and May.

Tests do cause a large amount of stress, but by denying primary age children in the state system an opportunity to buy into the culture, there is a much higher chance that they will struggle as they enter secondary school. By the time they make it to the Oxbridge entrance exam against Tarquin from Eton, they won’t stand a chance.

I largely agree with parents that the curriculum has left a lot to be desired. During my time at school, we were educated in a much more liberal and creative way, with tattered books dating back to 1970, inside a falling-down building (I believe the ceiling fell in twice during a History lesson in Year 12). It was all about content, not style. Nowadays, British education seems more concerned with building state-of-the-art complexes and reeling off the right words in the right order: no one particularly cares if the children enjoy learning about their subjects, or if they’re engaged by them, as long as they are churning out the scores and smiling for the local Gazette on results day.

The new curriculum does not take into account that engagement with a subject correlates with academic achievement. If you are bored out of your brain learning about Tsarist Russia, chances are you’re not going to do too well. If you’re fully engaged with postmodernist literature, devouring Plath, Hughes and Amis as if there’s no tomorrow, chances are you’re going to be more willing to revise for the exam and absorb the content (I understand that this is a very humanities based example, but I’m sure the same applies to the Sciences and Mathematics, if you’re as enthusiastic about a simultaneous equation as I am.)

So, in the quest to battle with the Education Secretary, I will join the parents in saying that the curriculum needs to be reconsidered, and children need to be treated less as numbers on a sheet and more as individuals who may respond differently to different forms of education. However, I don’t accept that getting rid of exams helps anyone. Our state-educated kids deserve that preparation, and taking it away from them further disadvantages them against more privileged peers who certainly will be used to sitting exams by the time they face their GCSEs.